Olympics: One Stands Again

It’s a cliché of foreign correspondence to quote your taxi-driver as a proxy for morale on the ground, but taxi-drivers’ complaints have been part of the story of this Olympics, and anyway my taxi driver in London had something significant to report, which is that I was the first fare he’d had all week who was involved in any way with the Olympics. “It’s been terrible,” he said. “There’s no work.” Not that he was enjoying what little work he had, what with all the rerouted traffic. Also, this was the time of year that he’d grown accustomed to seeing “exotic cars” on the streets, a nice relief from the monotony of the double-decker buses, but he associated those flashy cars with “Arabs,” whom he’d also detected an absence of in recent days. Maybe London’s immigrants, like its native citizens, have grown cynical and fled town?

I hailed the cab after having spent nearly half of my first twenty-four hours on the ground submitting to the inconsistencies of public transit. Forgive me: jet lag wasn’t helping. Arriving yesterday morning at Heathrow, I’d been pleased to discover that a press pass doubles as a ticket on the express train to Paddington Station. If only the express train were running! After an hour or so of apologetic signal-delay announcements, they came clean with the truth: there was a fire on the tracks, west of London, and train service was cancelled. (These are the so-called Twitter Olympics, one keeps hearing, but when I tried to tweet this disconcerting fact, in the interest of spreading mass hysteria, it turned out that there was a Twitter outage, too.) From there to the tube, then, which was running about as efficiently as the New York City subway on one of its worst summer days, with crowds to match the uptown 6. Later in the afternoon, while riding to a Nike reception, I watched a young girl in a spotted dress and matching shoes climb aboard and turn to her mother with a look of entitled disgust. “One stands again,” she said.

So I was ready to sit, this afternoon, after having braved my first Olympic rain shower at Lord’s Cricket Ground, where the archers jumped the gun on the opening ceremony. (A blind Korean man set a new world record; go figure.) And a short trip to my hotel—maybe four or five tube stops’ worth—became, instead, an hour-long ride across the river and back, with a driver who grumbled that the preparations for the Games had been done “on the cheap,” using “tents and temporary things.” One begins to absorb the local habits and characteristics, and so I’ll note, with what I hope is sufficient dryness, that the hotel’s elevators—sorry, lifts—are now inoperable. The most reliable way to get around this town seems to be on foot.